Northern Voice (2006)

So I’m up to my eye­balls in pro­ceed­ings papers for XML 2005 which is one end of the con­fer­ence spec­trum in terms of form­al­ity, work for the chair and the plan­ning com­mit­tee, and degree to which things must be organ­ised, when along comes the remind­er that the web site is up for North­ern Voice 2006. North­ern Voice is proof that there are cer­tain con­fer­ence con­cepts that don’t need a high degree of form­al­ity, in fact the concept of per­son­al blog­ging is, I think, dia­met­ric­ally opposed to too much form­al­ity, so as a mem­ber of the organ­ising group (plan­ning com­mit­tee seems a bit, ah, form­al a term) I’ve always been on the side of “keep it simple, keep it informal”. 

Last year’s event was a lot of fun and people seemed to really enjoy them­selves. So this year we’re put­ting a Moose Camp on the day before the con­fer­ence itself, where people can organ­ise them­selves into groups to dis­cuss whatever they want to dis­cuss that’s related in some way to per­son­al blog­ging. Dead­line for speak­er sub­mis­sions (we need to have some form­al­ity!) is Novem­ber 16, Moose camp is on Feb­ru­ary 10, the con­fer­ence is on Feb­ru­ary 11 and all the oth­er dates are on the web site. Yes, we still have the moose logo, although the col­ours are dif­fer­ent. Yes, we’re plan­ning on hav­ing more t‑shirts next year. No, we don’t yet know who the key­note speak­ers will be. Maybe we won’t have key­note speak­ers, we’ll fig­ure that out when we see the speak­er sub­mis­sions and see what sort of pro­gram we can build. Hope to see you there!